The True Story of Hansel and Gretel (30 page)

They had worked all one morning laying pots in the dirt, until suddenly the Mechanik stopped walking and turned his face up to the sky, listening. It was beautiful. The most beautiful sound he had ever heard.

They all stood, draped with arms around one another’s shoulders, and were silent. The booming was steady and definite. It was gunfire, but not the stuttering they had heard for weeks. This was the steady beat of heavy artillery. It throbbed in the distance like the thunder of a coming storm, and they all smiled. It was the sound of a mighty force coming toward them. The full weight of Mother Russia was moving over the land.

“My brothers. We’re going to drive the rats out and kill them and then go home and be heroes and make our women happy.” The Russian began to sing a song in Russian, and the Poles sang in Polish, and the Mechanik, for the first time in his adult life, began to sing a song in Yiddish that his father had hummed when he sat with his grandchild in the garden and fed her oranges.

They sang softly, the rhythm of the artillery serving as a drumbeat to the songs, until they saw the first tank coming through the woods into the meadow. A man rode on top peering ahead. Another tank was behind and several men clung to the top of it.

They waited, and heard the man on the first tank scream out a warning. The tank sputtered and churned to a halt. There was a lot of shouting in German that the partisans couldn’t hear clearly, but they didn’t have to hear it. The Germans thought the mounds of dirt over the pots was a minefield.

“They’ll have to go back a mile to find any other field. And that one leads to a swamp.”

“They’ll take to the road.”

“They’re too heavy. They’ll sink in the mud by afternoon. The mud will be impossible.”

The tanks had disappeared, and a group of about twenty men trotted into the meadow. They began to approach the buried pots cautiously.

“They’re going to clear a path.” The Russian was almost dancing for joy. “Let’s get rid of this bunch.”

With one accord, the partisans raised their rifles and began to pick off the Nazis. The meadow was littered with their bodies.

“They’ll think a mine got them. This field is going to stay empty for a while.” The Mechanik was pleased. Since his wife had disappeared, he had taken more joy in seeing the Germans die.

The men grinned. They all shook hands and one of the younger village men who had helped collect the pots stood before the Russian and saluted as if the Russian were a Polish army officer.

“My parents are slaves in Germany. I’m not afraid of dying. Let me go with you.”

“What do you call yourself, boy?” The Russian looked the peasant over. He had a rifle in his hand and the lump of a pistol under his coat.

“Dobry. I can fight.”

The Russian laughed and slapped the boy on the back. He had guns. He was strong. “Fight with us then. Until we drive them to Berlin and kill them.”

They moved off around the field, heading toward the sound of the artillery in the distance. It wasn’t much that they’d done, and they knew it, but every German slowed down, every tank abandoned in a field or bogged in the swamps, was a small victory.

“When we get to Germany,” Dobry asked Starzec, “will we find our people, do you think? The ones they took to work?”

Starzec shrugged. He didn’t have the heart to tell the boy how unlikely it was that the Germans would let a Polish slave have food when the Germans were hungry. He didn’t want to discourage this orphan.

“What God wills is what happens. Pray for the Poles in Germany and Russia, boy.”

Dobry nodded out of respect for the older man. After all, Starzec had had the idea that stopped the tanks. But he didn’t pray. He had prayed for three years, and there was no good that had come of the prayers. As if hearing his thoughts, Starzec spoke again.

“We prayed that the Russians be driven out, and the Germans did it. Now we’ve prayed that the Nazis be destroyed. Look at the Nazi bastards on the road. They’re beaten. While we’re killing the last of them and driving them out, we can pray for those Poles kidnapped and stolen from us.”

Dobry thought about it. It was true. The Russians had been beaten back into Russia, and the Nazis were now fleeing Poland. He shook his head stubbornly.

“It didn’t happen fast enough. Half of Poland died before God helped us.”

“God’s time isn’t our time.” Starzec sighed.

“God shouldn’t have let this killing happen. God should have stopped it.”

Starzec gestured at the trees and the forest around them. “Do you see God? Where is he, you fool?”

Dobry flushed and shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“God didn’t come down and kill us. I don’t see God shooting children and priests. None of us met God beating up Jews and shoving them into railroad cars. This is men doing the murdering. Talk to men about their evil, kill the evil men, but pray to God. You can’t expect God to come down and do our living for us. We have to do that ourselves.”

Starzec turned his back on the boy and walked on, feeling the pains in his knees and back and ignoring them. He had a long walk before this war would be over and he safely back in his bed in Warsaw—in what would be left of Warsaw when the Nazis and the Russians had burned and looted it—but he didn’t like to think about that.

The young peasant stood staring after the older man, and he was so flushed that his eyes watered. He brushed away the tears and trotted behind Starzec, and his mind, almost against his will, began to form prayers for his father and mother, for all the Poles taken from their country, kidnapped and beaten and starved and perhaps worked to death or dead already in the camps. He prayed, and the prayers developed a sort of rhythm as he walked, and his mind grew quiet as they moved steadily eastward toward the thunder of death.

They had no trouble finding food. There were trucks, abandoned and pushed off the road into the trees, that had food in them. There were dead Germans left behind in the race to stay in front of the Russian troops and get out of Poland.

“They know if my countrymen catch them, there’ll be no pity.” The Russian smiled. “The Russians have suffered like no one else. They won’t let a German live.”

The older Pole shook his head. “Let’s not debate who has suffered most. Anyone alive hasn’t suffered that much, or they’d be dead,” he said. “The real sufferers can’t brag about their suffering anymore.”

The guns were near now, and there weren’t many Germans left on the road. It was desolate and silent, only the machines torn apart and cannibalized so other machines could be fixed, the bodies abandoned, the guns sunk in the mud, a reminder that the German army had struggled past.

That night they found boxes in the snow, the ropes of the parachute and the silk cloth still attached. Inside were treasures they hadn’t seen since before the war.

The Mechanik used the can opener taped to the side of a can, and when it opened with a glitter of tin, the men stood silent. Their mouths watered as they smelled it.

“Canned meat!”

They dug in with their fingers and smeared the meat paste on the hard bread. There were guns and ammunition and vodka and, most amazing of all, a little medical kit with aspirin and bandages and salve for wounds, a needle and some gut, and a vial marked MORPHINE.

“Good Russian bread,” the Russian cried as he held the bread in his mouth. It was too hard for his teeth, but he held it and thought it tasted better than the Polish bread.

The guns were silent now except for an occasional boom. They walked over fields that were covered with holes from the shells.

It was late afternoon on the eleventh of March when they saw up ahead, on the other side of a field, coming over the top of a rise in the ground, men walking. They didn’t walk fast, but there was a relentless quality to the movement that made the Mechanik shiver. He looked at the face of the older Pole and saw that he was shaken too.

It wasn’t men so much as it was a wave of humans. Most weren’t in uniform. They were a flood of ragged, gray men who just walked and didn’t stop. The tide of men covered the hill behind them.

“Move back to the road,” the Russian said. His face glowed. “I’ll call out in Russian first, and get the attention of some of the men. You can hide until they see I’m a Russian.”

First a truck passed them and then a small vehicle. “It’s a Jeep,” the Mechanik said in awe.

“What’s that?” The Russian watched the odd, open car, painted dark green, move off through the mud.

“The Americans have them. I saw a picture once. In Bialystok.”

“How did the Russians get it?”

“The Americans must have sent them.”

They watched as tanks and trucks and more Jeeps began to fill the road. They were muddy, but they had a modern look that pleased the Mechanik. Other engineers had been busy while he lay hiding in the ghetto. His hands itched to open the hoods on the trucks and see what they had been inventing since he had been trapped in the irrational world of war. When the road was nearly covered, the Russian made a gesture with his hand, and all of them melted back into the woods.

“Pray,” Starzec said as he lay behind a log. “They are killing everyone in their path.”

The men heard the Russian calling out in his own language. He called for a long time, and then other voices shouted answers. None of the partisans understood the language.

“Come out,” the Russian began screaming in Polish. “Come out. My brothers are here.”

The Russian was standing in the road. Men were kissing him on the cheeks and on the lips. They were grabbing him and laughing.

“Come on,” he said, shouting at them. “We’re going with these comrades. They’re going back to our part of the forest to clean the Nazis out of the villages. We can show them the way.”

The Mechanik began to smile. They were going back to where the children had been left. Back to that village near the road where he had last seen them in November.

“I’m coming, my darlings,” he whispered. “And you, my wife. I’ll find you. I’m coming.” They could be where he had left the motorcycle in two weeks, maybe in ten days. Then he would go to each village and ask. Someone must have taken the children in. She was such a beautiful girl. His son was so quick and alert.

It was March 11, 1944, and they weren’t partisans anymore. They were part of the gray locust hoard of the Russian army, fighting in the open, cleaning out the enemy. The partisans walked down the road with the Russians, and even the Poles were smiling. This foreign army was walking on Polish soil, but perhaps they would be content to return to Russia when the Germans were dead and beaten. Perhaps freedom was coming soon.

There was so little left to steal or use in Poland. Half the Poles must be dead, the flower of the men killed. Surely there was nothing about Poland for anyone to covet now. The government in exile in London said that the British and the Americans promised freedom for Poland when the war was over. They had heard it on the illegal radios in Bialystok for a year now. Freedom would come. The world had promised it to them.